'Citizens Power' gets mixed reviews from Nicaraguans

MANAGUA, Nicaragua — The government billboards and graffiti in this sultry city tell a visitor a lot about the ideological battle racking Nicaragua.

President Daniel Ortega beams from the billboards, promising "Citizens Power" as a solution to Nicaragua's endemic poverty. "The world's poor arise!" the signs say. But beneath the billboards, on walls and benches, others have scrawled "No to CPC. No to dictatorship."

The graffiti alludes to Citizens Power Councils - or CPCs. In December, Ortega established the neighborhood committees, which are controlled by his left-wing Sandinista party and administer anti-poverty programs, despite a vote against the plan by the National Assembly.

Ortega, a former Marxist guerrilla leader, maintains that the councils are meant only to let community leaders have a say in how government money is spent. But opposition leaders say the councils are another step in what they call the Ortega administration's drift toward an authoritarian and secretive government that does not have to answer to the legislature - mostly because the president controls tens of millions of dollars a year in aid from Venezuela.

Some of the president's opponents say the Citizens Power Councils are patronage mills, channeling government largesse to supporters of the party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Ortega has made no attempt to hide his desire to make an end run around the National Assembly. He declared last fall that the legislature's vote against the councils was intended "to deny the right of the people to exercise power" and "to keep ministers from governing directly with the people."

"It is the people who have the final say on the system they want," Ortega said at a rally on Dec. 1.

Opposition leaders complain the councils are similar to party-controlled organs in totalitarian governments like Cuba's, where local committees of party loyalists not only influence who gets government benefits but also spy on political opponents.

"It's part of a vision that President Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, have to destroy the model of representative democracy and replace it with a direct democracy," said Jose Pallais, a Liberal Party leader. "The CPC serve as a fundamental element, a strategy, to control the society, to spy on the people."

Elias Chevez, a Sandinista party leader who oversees the citizen councils in Managua, denied that the councils showed favoritism in handing out subsidies, though he acknowledged that they were controlled by the party.

He portrayed the critics of the councils as members of a corrupt oligarchy interested only in protecting business interests. "These people don't want the population to have a role, to play a part," he said.

One complaint of the opposition is that the financing of both the committees and the social programs they administer remains murky. Last year, Nicaragua and Venezuela signed a deal that opposition leaders and budget experts say has given Ortega's administration essentially a slush fund worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Under the deal, Venezuela supplies Nicaragua with about 10 million barrels of oil a year, enough to cover all the country's energy needs. Nicaragua pays half the market price and has 23 years to pay off the rest at 2 percent interest.

But the loans are not reflected in the national budget, because the transactions are handled through a quasi-public company called Albanisa and the state-owned oil company, Petronic. The Ortega administration has never given a full accounting to the legislature of how the money is spent.